Impeccable class balance

I was going to write a post about how I hate Arthas as a character so goddamned much and how Blizzard has subverted all the excitement I once had regarding killing the Lich King. Which is still the case, but I realized I've never said anything nice about WoW; a game I ostensibly like given how much I play and talk about it. So let's take a hate-break and talk about something really great about WoW: near-perfect PVEclass balance.

To look at major WoW forums (mmo-champ, wow official forums, etc) you'd suspect every single class was terrible at everything it does, except for DKs who are broken monsters. And that was, while hyperbole, reflective more or less of the early wrath days, when DK tanks were just better flat out than other tanks, their DPS soared like the mighty eagle (or briefly, like the feral druid). Even then, other classes weren't BAD, just overshadowed, but that's close enough to bad to be interchangeable when talking about balance and composition. But how are things these days?

In PVE, it's amazingly good. In ye olde days of WoW, if you rolled the wrong class, then you ran a serious risk of not getting to see content, regardless of skill. More than that, if you wanted to fill a specific role, your class options were severely restricted (ret DPS? shammy heals? NO). Nowadays, no matter what class you rolled, you can get a raid slot. What's more, you can fill any role your class can do on any encounter without having the raid suffer. What's even MORE, even the pure DPS classes have at least 2 spec each that are viable, providing a wider class appeal and a more diverse play environment.

The really great thing here is Blizzard's somewhat newfound commitment to making every class and spec fit well into PVE. While this dream might never be fully attained (Subtlety, looking at you), the simple fact that they're trying constantly to keep every class distinct while balanced, and what's more, succeeding at it, is enough to put WoW heads and tails over any other MMO on the market. There are no bad choices to make when rolling a class; that is what I mean by perfect class balance.